


The Persistence of Memory

by ljs



Series: the Art World AU [1]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-01
Updated: 2015-01-01
Packaged: 2018-03-04 19:25:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,951
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3085349
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ljs/pseuds/ljs
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Inspired by Salvador Dali's painting "The Persistence of Memory," which I rather think the Doctor would like. All-human AU.</p><p>The Doctor's a painter and art professor, missing his wife, feeling uneasy about his new colleague and former lover, being bossed around by co-workers and friends. Just another average day for a man obsessed by time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Persistence of Memory

Morning coffee at his side, he’s happily sketching the College clock – an ornate Victorian monstrosity set into an always crumbling tower in the centre of the Quad – when he hears a horrifyingly familiar voice.

“Hi, darling boy.”

His pen skids across the surface of the paper, fucking ruining the line of the 12 he just finished. Looks like a bloody broken clock. Appropriate.

“Missy,” he says without turning around.

“Doctor,” she whispers in his ear, and now he feels the warmth of her at his back, the fingers clawed onto his shoulders. “That’s not the best way to greet a new colleague, is it?”

“It’s my way.” He closes his sketchbook with a modicum of casual grace – he hopes – and then gets up from the stone bench, stepping away from her as he does. She lets him go, because she has always let him go, but not without drawing blood first. He turns.

She’s grinning at him. She’s got that bloody “signature” hat, which is and always has been stupid, tipped over her eyes, and the tailored black jacket, which is so utterly ridiculous for an art professor who specializes in installations, for fuck’s sake, buttoned over her curves. There’s a folder and a new key in her hand.

“What studio do you have?” he says.

“Two doors down from you!” she carols.

He takes another step back. “Fucking fuck me,” he mutters, and turns on his heel, and makes a less than dignified escape.

But he can hear her giggling “Already have!”

He leaves his coffee. He's too busy running.  
……………………………………………

“So if you don’t like Missy Masterson, why didn’t you vote against her hiring?” Clara says.

He glares at her. If he didn’t like _her_ so damn much, for tuppence he’d throw her out of his studio. And also she’s not finished the catalogue for his upcoming retrospective at the Tate Modern, but it’s the principle of the thing.

He contents himself with yanking out of her hands a framed pen-and-ink sketch (“Trenzalore,” a vaguely surrealist rendering of a cemetery he’d come across in the South of France; currently planned for the final grouping of work). “I did vote against her. Didn’t help.”

Clara scoots her workstool closer to the table – has to, since she’s a mite of a woman even if an eminent museum curator and art historian– and rests her chin on her hands. She’s gone all eyes, which she _knows_ irritates him. “So the rumours about you and her are true?”

He resists saying “What rumours?” because actually he has a pretty fair idea. And, yes, to his eternal regret they are in fact true. Before his marriage he’d had a dangerous habit of hooking up with Missy every so often, after which always came disaster. He has a sudden gut-twisting memory of an encounter at Art Basel some years ago: perched like a crow in the front row of his lecture audience, she’d opened her legs and flashed him. He’d managed not to stumble too much then, but later that night she’d caught him outside his hotel room door, and he’d succumbed. They’d fucked each other so roughly that they’d broken the bed.

Bloody woman had actually bought the cracked headboard from the hotel and used it in her next installation, which she’d named “House Call.” She’d sold it for eighty thousand dollars to some idiot punter from New York.

Anyway, he doesn’t deign to answer. Instead he puts “Trenzalore” in its crate and says, “What next?”

“What next? For me, lunch and then back home to London for the weekend. For you, well, aren’t you driving up to Leadworth this afternoon? You need to collect the show centrepiece, after all.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he mutters.

“Do as you are told,” she says cheerfully, and follows it up with a sharp slap on the shoulder.

“Gods and monsters, you are bloody bossy,” he says.

“Shut up or I’ll hug you.”

“Not that, never that.”

They grin at each other. Some people are tactile, some are not, he’s told her, and his embraces are not easily given any more. His arms have been empty for months, what with his wife being off on a bloody year-long dig – _never fucking marry an archeologist_ – but he’s okay with that. Mostly. Clara likes to give him grief about his attitude, but then she’s also more than capable of ignoring his attitude when she feels he needs human contact.

She’s got that gleam in her eye now, in fact, and he sidesteps her lunge. But he’s only saved by a knock on the doorjamb of the studio and her husband’s “Abusing the artists again, are you?”

“Danny!” she says in delight, and alters her trajectory to grab him around the middle.

Lecturer Danny Pink, unusually well-dressed for a maths boffin, catches her easily. Then, acid-edged, “Hello, Professor.”

“P.E.” The Doctor really shouldn’t call him that, despite Danny’s old rowing Blue, but it’s enjoyable to wind the boy up. They have never got on for some reason – perhaps because the boy’s not good enough for Clara, in the Doctor’s admittedly prejudiced estimation; perhaps it’s because the boy just doesn’t like art, never has, which the Doctor finds absurd and unadventurous.

“Shut it, both of you,” Clara says. “Play nice.”

“I’m always nice,” the Doctor says.

“Liar.” She collects her briefcase, gives him a stealth one-armed hug, and then hesitates at the doorway. “When do you think you’ll get to Leadworth?”

“You’re not my schedule-keeper, Clara.”

“Yes, I am.”

He wants to argue a bit more, but… “I’m going to go right now.”

“See that you do.”

Holding onto Danny’s reluctant sleeve, she watches until the Doctor locks his studio door. He says crankily, “Are you happy now.”

“Getting there. Be safe. Don’t forget to come back, you’ve got more stuff to show me.” 

He waves a dismissive hand and ignores her parting gift of laughter in favour of striding away toward the fellows’ car park.  
…………………………………………

“Doctor!” comes that horribly familiar voice, just as he puts his key in the door of his ancient blue Audi.

“Go away.” He opens the door with some force and throws his satchel inside.

“Running away, my dear?” she says, far too close.

“I have things to do.” He does turn, though. Just to make sure where she is.

She’s hovering on this side of the oak doors of the studio wing, flanked by her male assistants… what were their names? Seb and Chang? He doesn’t usually retain names, even with his students. It’s a thing.

“Scared?” she says.

“No.” And as he gives the automatic negative, he realizes suddenly that he means it. She has terrified him in the past, and perhaps she will again in the future, but right now he is not in the same place he was before his marriage, before his late-career bloom, before the friends he’s made in the past few years.

Right now _she’s_ looking warily at _him_. Missy’s a madwoman, reckless and fond of destruction, and the only thing that ever frightens her is sanity. Holding onto his sudden calm certainty that she’s not going to fuck with his head this time – his morning nerves notwithstanding – he goes to her and takes her hand.

“What are you doing, Doctor?”

‘Thanking you for clearing something up for me.” He shakes her hand gravely, lets his thumb skip across her soft skin as it used to, then steps back. “Welcome to the Ruskin School, Missy.”

Her eyes glitter – danger, danger, Doctor – but he doesn’t stay to become a target.

He’d promised Clara he’d go, and he will. He believes in keeping promises.  
………………………………………………..

He doesn’t take the motorway, even though it would be faster. He’s driven a circuitous route a hundred times; a small village twenty miles outside Leadworth has his favourite spot.

The pale limestone church tower gleams above the trees even before he reaches the village. But this tower doesn’t have the usual bells; it has a clock.

He pulls onto the verge just by the churchyard, collects his sketchbook, and goes to a bench on the green across the road. Here the numbers on the giant clock-face seem distorted, the winter sunlight breaking just the right way for his favourite effect.

It looks rather as if time is melting, just like the Dali painting “The Persistence of Memory.” When he was still in school he’d seen a print of it for the first time, and he’d lost an afternoon gazing at the colours, the wet plasticity of the world and time.

The scholars say that this image has influenced the Doctor’s work throughout his life. He wouldn’t argue with that assessment.

Swiftly his hand moves over the sketchbook. He draws the clock wet and dissolving as if in tears.

He thinks of his wife. A year is a fucking long time to be alone, it feels like a thousand. He draws faster. His yearning flows from his hand to his art.

………………………………………………….  
His dear friend Amy opens the door of her and her husband Rory’s house. She’s all red hair and long legs and brilliance there on the threshold, frowning at him. “Oi, weren’t you supposed to be here an hour ago?”

“Was I? I got distracted.” He grins at her.

“Yeah, yeah.” She darts at him and picks a thread off his favourite jumper. “Look at you, raggedy man. You’re coming undone, you need someone to look after you.”

“Ha,” he says, and takes a first step forward, and braces himself.

Yes, she’s going to hug him. He has to let her. She’d kill him otherwise.

It’s smothering for a moment, the force of Amelia Pond’s affection, but then it passes, with just a final ruffle of his hair. “Greyer than when I last saw you,” she says delightedly.

“Shut up,” he says, and comes inside.

Rory is standing by the already boxed-up painting the Doctor is here to collect – “Companions,” a study of Amy and Rory in shapes and clock-faces, with a shadow-figure just out of their reach. “Hello, Doctor.”

They smile at the same time. Rory’s a comforting presence, the eye of Amy’s hurricane, and the Doctor has always found their balance a miracle despite time’s buffets. The three of them had spent several years running together around Europe, until Amy took that energy and poured it into her writing and Rory had the home he’d wanted.

Of course, it hadn’t always been just the three of them. He’d met his wife through them – they’d been school-friends. The thought nags at him for a moment, he feels a sudden warmth –

“Come and have some tea,” Amy orders, grabbing his arm.

“Rather have coffee, if it’s all the same to you,” he begins, and then she leaves him at the threshold of the kitchen alone, and he sees.

His wife sits at the kitchen counter, making a big production of looking at her watch. “What kind of time do you call this, then?”

“Sorry, honey,” he says through a sudden constriction in his throat. “Traffic was hell.”

“No, it wasn’t,” she says, and the light of her smile is everything. “Clara texted me you’d left, but it was just your bad driving that made you late, wasn’t it?”

“Shut up, shut up, shut up,” he says, and then they’re in each other’s arms, and then he’s kissing her. She tastes the same, coffee and cinnamon and River. She wraps him up, takes him in, takes him over, two months before she was supposed to be back.

He doesn’t know how much time they’ll have, but this moment is everything. This moment he’ll remember when she’s gone again.

This moment he’ll paint, in shades of blue like a river.


End file.
